45 minutes
by i love alex
Summary: Wake up, wake up, wake up, he recites, as if poetry, please wake up.


A/N: I'll just throw in a disclaimer right off the bat here and say that this is probably the strangest thing I've ever written. It could be longer and better, there are two other fics I'm in the middle that are probably much more fit to be published but hey, at this point, I'll take whatever I can get – or at least, I'll post whichever story let's me finish it.

A little exposition to help set it up: Elena has been rescued from the vampire experimentation lab and Stefan and Damon have taken up vigil as they wait for her to wake up.

Enjoy.

* * *

45 minutes.

He's counting. She won't start breathing. 46 minutes, she's unconscious and unbearably still; he gets the blood off of her cheeks.

47 minutes, he can't stop, minute after minute he keeps track. One minute had turned into 5. 5 into 20.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, he recites, as if poetry, please wake up.

45 minutes, he's drowning.

46 minutes, she's lying at the bottom of the ocean, already dead.

"She got the unfiltered vervain cocktail."

Damon speaks to his hands, standing in the far corner of his bedroom. For over half an hour now, he's been revealing secrets. Information. Catching Stefan up on the years of torment as an Augustine vampire. Talking him through the gap that had made up their distance between one another. A gap that Stefan had always assumed was put there deliberately.

Stefan wants to ask what the difference is between the filtered version and the unfiltered version but with Elena still unconscious – the answer seemed fairly obvious.

"I looked for you. Once the war had ended, I searched for you everywhere."

48 minutes: he takes her hand in his.

Damon opens his mouth to speak but then hesitates, closing it; he's too drained to even present a counter offer to this plea, to this apology Stefan is giving him. He's suddenly reminded of being a small boy, of a time when he was affixed with the idea that he and his brother could communicate through thoughts alone.

"You should've told me." Stefan continues softly.

Only to be presented with, repeatedly, the reality of the fact that his brother's mind and his own were great things but also, very very separate.

Very, frustratingly so to Damon, unique in their differences.

"Should've. Would've. Could've…stop already. I get it. You would've saved me. The end."

Licking its way up to the surface, Damon's coldness is nothing more but a barrier – exhaustion be damned. But this back and forth game between them, of apologies against rage, was getting repetitive and Damon hated having to repeat himself. He was tired. Scared. Elena hadn't so much as flinched and too vividly was he being reminded of a time, months ago, when he had been watching from a different corner in a different room. Watching her with desperate, obsessive eyes as she climbed back to the surface, crossing the line between death and being reborn as a vampire.

"I kissed Katherine."

Like a button someone just pressed, Damon makes instant movements out and away from his den. More words than he'd rather say and more questions that he should want to ask are cramming in his mouth, tempted to spill right out. But when he opens his mouth again, he asks only one.

"Why?"

Stefan manages to, a strain of will, detach his eyesight from Elena lying as she was along Damon's bed and looks over to Damon. It was twilight, the sun disappearing and the shadow from Damon's body was so great, it reached the bed, practically engulfed it.

Stefan doesn't know why, there was no logical explanation. He'd been trying to come up with one the minute Caroline had traipsed into the library, catching them on the couch, levelling on him, a pair of eyes that held only cool indignation and disappointment. Elena, he thinks, is in that look. _What are you going to tell Elena?_

"I get it." But Damon's looking over at the bed as he says it and Stefan wants to shake his head and cross the room and grab his brother as he had wanted to explicate to Caroline because no, no he did not; he hadn't kissed Katherine believing he was kissing someone else. He could separate, compartmentalise, there were differences. He was letting go, he was.

He suddenly wants nothing more than to be alone.

"She'll be waking up soon, the less people around her the better. Let me know how she is."

52 minutes: he drops her hand.

He's off the bed and Damon for a moment, looks unapologetically disconcerted. Stefan watches on in confusion, not knowing why it seemed that the idea of being alone with Elena, usually a great gift to Damon, the medal across his neck, now seemed to summon panic. Something must've happened, Stefan thinks, hesitating, wondering if he really should leave them alone together. An ironic action, he could laugh if his chest wasn't grating the way it was; if he could breath better, if the idea of leaving her alone at all, leaving her with anyone else, leaving her completely, wasn't the catalyst for his own panic.

"Damon."

And the flourish is gone, Damon has gathered himself together in milliseconds; he's already within arms reach of her, of Elena. He nods stiffly and tries a smile but it starts and finishes in the same thin line of both lips.

"A distraction." He mutters when Stefan has turned his back and it isn't until Stefan has reached his own bedroom, a fortress of solitude within an island of disorientation, he realizes that his brother has answered his own question.

* * *

The note reads:

_Stefan, I took Katherine with me to my moms. Everything is going to be okay. Don't worry. Talk to you soon. Caroline._

The sentence '_don't worry'_, is underlined twice and the reason for the emphasis is clear: don't worry about Katherine and don't worry about Elena. The two seemed to be knotted in his mind and it's a marvel that a year ago, two, their separation was nothing short of paramount.

He paces his room and takes off his jacket. Tosses back a drink. Starts to write in the only blank journal he could find in his closet, the only one he hadn't tossed and burnt up.

What makes up one could not make up the other, he writes and then sits back, pen between his fingers. He twirls it, taps it against the desk as the sentence burns and burns. What did he mean by that? Could it be wrong? Could Elena's light meld and mould to Katherine's dark, could they be different, the same, both.

Stefan stands and snaps the journal shut, tossing it to the floor. He takes a moment, standing completely still, this room empty until she's there on his balcony and there along his bed and there in the bathroom, on the couch, her picture is on his chest of drawers – she's everywhere Katherine never was and he never wanted her to be.

He never meant to look for Elena in those places but it seemed, that is where she had ended up. Her memory hugging his own – their memory, he wanted to protect it – was here and there, against that bed, he had memorized her eyelashes and that smile was his up close.

Stefan begins to pace again, in order to stop counting. The minutes have reached into the hundreds.

She's been unconscious for over a hundred minutes now and he has counted.

Every single one.

* * *

He's start to beg her. Audibly against her arm. Please please please, wake up.

Begging soon turns to pleading and then to bargaining.

And then he's silent. He stops, exasperated, sick of having to bite his tongue to keep from crying. Sick of that cliff beneath his feet, the one that threatened to tug away beneath him, leaving him falling and falling and falling. Sick of her and loving her and that it was never, ever right or enough when it wasn't sex and her body and the sounds she would release. Because he's right beside her, struggling to remember what it was, how it was - the sound of her voice when she speaks.

Sick, he was, of it all.

He's almost out of the room, he's made it practically all the way, when he hears it. The opening, the breath, the blink. She opens her eyes and takes a sip and starts to ignite: he exhales. Finally, he thinks.

But he swings open the door, shattering the façade, he doesn't want to try anymore and he leaves anyway.

* * *

He hears it from afar at first. It grows louder, to a growl, a call, a siren.

Stefan, he hears and he fastens himself up for the run; run he would, across worlds and worlds, across broken grounds, shattered lands to just, get to her.

125 minutes.

She says his name again, Stefan. A sigh, a want, a need. Please.

You were always my difference, you're enough, you're you – it's you, he writes in the journal across his mind.

He enters the room like it's tripped with wires, waiting for him to hit and sound off. She's so tiny but then she contradicts it all with his heart, how it grows at the sight of her.

"It's okay." He whispers and takes her in his arms; gaining strength from her body, her strength carrying them both.

"Everything is going to be okay."

* * *

"Damon killed my parents. He ticked off my father's name on his imaginary hit list and he forced their car of the road."

He keeps his eyes closed. Hating this part. Knowing it had to come, he had guessed it from the days beginning, as Damon had started to explain and explain – fess up, deliver his fate. Perhaps in some way, understanding that it would ultimate to this. This whispered admittance between the people he loved more than anything, everything; the love he could never get quite right.

"Yes." Stefan breaks, his eyes still shut. Her hand is suddenly on top of his, she's doing it again, holding them both. What would this mean for them, though, he wants to ask. For her. For the rest, for the ending he never wanted.

He had always, always pictured her and they were only married to beginnings.

"Never again." She says and for a moment, he doesn't know who or what this is to but then understands, when she doesn't continue – it's in reference to everything he could possibly imagine. Never again would Damon kill the things she loves. Never again could she go back to him. Never again. No more separation, lies, difference between them.

"I kissed Katherine. We slept together. In this house. In the library. Twice. I slept with her, twice."

Never again, he wants to repeat but can't. He can't open his mouth at all.

She's calm. She begins to trace patterns across his arm; they're lying side by side on his bed, disconnected lovers. But he could roll into her all over again and she would let him, he thinks.

"I left you for Damon." Is her answer; does it make sense, does it equal out, he wonders. Is it supposed to? He opens his eyes, moves closer, they're stomach to stomach and kisses her, hungry and lonely without her, he kisses her entire mouth.

Because it didn't matter.

Soon, she's naked and he's naked and this bed is naked and their together; there's been distance and hurt and pain and time, but naked beneath one another, naked to heel and to hips, time lapsed. Time has stopped.

I only want you, she breathes, I only ever wanted to you. It sounds like an apology, her whispers and her wet, disfigured grunts, her arms around his neck, their rise and sink together. The bed bucks, this house is theirs, Damon has left, their kingdom, their fortress of solitude, their private reconnection.

"I left, didn't I?" She asks, hours later, minutes later, she's awake and his and looking across the room, "I changed and left."

She did, he thinks but then again, he has too. Many times across many decades, he has changed and has been damaged and has grown – grown full. Grown to this point, this standstill, of wanting nothing more and nothing less but her. Her voice, he could listen to, he wants to hear, for forever. He has grown to this.

"And you will leave again, my love." He kisses the top of her head and she pulls down the sheets, climbing on top of him, their limbs sloppy and their kisses heavy, he wants to write some more. About her. About them. There is no difference.

"Never again." She repeats as a promise against his ear and with their limbs and their voices and this bed beneath them, he must agree.

Never again.

For all the minutes to come.


End file.
